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By Mazin Qumsiyeh

1) Palestine was colonized and replaced by a colonial settler state called “Israel”. The ideas was simply to take a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious country and transform it to a “Jewish state.” The core of this project (Zionism) is ethnic cleansing which started under British Rule (to fulfil the illegal Balfour declaration) and continued and accelerated under more direct Zionism control and continues today in places like Shaikh Jarrah in Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine (inside and outside the so-called green line). That is why we have 7.5 million Palestinian refugees and displaced and 530 villages and towns wiped out.

2) International law is very clear: Palestinian Refugees have a right to return to their homes and lands, Israeli colonial settlements built since 1967 including in Jerusalem are illegal, and Israel has engaged in processes that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity

3) Israel has never been a democracy. It is an apartheid racist regime that even after expelling most Palestinians, have instituted 65 laws that discriminate against the remaining 1.5 million native Palestinians (became a minority of 20% of the population). Yet Israel also is the power that rules over the lives of 4.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who are not given Israeli citizenship and they are subject to hundreds of military orders that serve as racist laws. For example the denial of entry to our own city of Jerusalem even for religious reasons to visit the holy sites.

4) Zionist propaganda is easy to refute with logical explanations based on facts (and the three principles above). For example, it is easy to answer the non-sense like Israel is defending itself and using wrong analogies like what if Mexico shoots rockets into the US, what should be the response? Answer: wrong analogy: If someone comes and shoots your brother, points a gun at your head and tells you to get out of your house and they claim their religion tells them to do so. Then you are pushed down the street and they besiege you and stop you from getting food and medicine and test new guns on you every few years then you decide to throw a stone towards your old house so they take an RPG and level your new house, do you call this “self-defense” or “disproportionate response”? Who is then the terrorist? Anyway international law is clear on this point: colonized/occupied people have a right of resistance. Anyway colonization is itself violence: ask native Americans and Blacks in South Africa or any other country that went through the experience. Colonization kills 10 native civilians for every 1 colonizer (in Palestine as in South Africa under apartheid). The answer is simple, end apartheid ends the violence (exhibit A: South Africa).

5) No colonial – anti-colonial struggle has ever ended in a “two-state solution”. It is fictional and the talk about it from the time that Ben Gurion proposed it over 100 years ago is merely (as Ben Gurion himself stated on more than one occasion) intended for PR efforts (he even cited colonial treaties with native Americans which could be broken after consolidating powers). Colonial-Native struggles end in one of three scenarios: a) Algerian model (nearly 2 million killed, 1 million colonizers and their descendants left the country), b) genocide of natives (USA, Australia), c) coexistence in one country of descendants of colonizers and of native people (the rest of the world >140 countries). There is no fourth scenario. Palestine will not be an exception. It is the last struggle and prolonged only because of the resourcefulness and wealth of Zionists and the weakness of their victims with collusion of corrupt Arab leaders and western governments beholden to special interest lobbies. This explains Israel’s impunity from international law.

6) If we want a roadmap to real sustainable peace (not pacification), all we have to do is insist that we implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It has all the needed elements (no discrimination, rights of refugees to return etc).

7) Thus it is clear that people around this planet need to have joint struggle (including via a push for boycotts, divestment and sanctions) just like we did with South Africa to end the Israeli regime of apartheid and implement human rights.

You can add resources here like reports and statements from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem etc

Mazin Qumsiyeh
Professor, Founder, and (volunteer) Director
Palestine Museum of Natural History
Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability
Bethlehem University
Occupied Palestine
http://qumsiyeh.org
http://palestinenature.org

19 May 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

Pain mixed with hope; defiance in the face of unimaginable odds; celebrities show solidarity with Palestine; large protests held in solidarity with Palestinians around the world; Palestinians strike across all of occupied Palestine from the river to the sea; intifada everywhere; a sea change in public perceptions of Palestine and Israel, so much so that NPR this morning called Hamas a “Nationalist Palestinian” movement, instead of the usual “terrorist” designation.

Designations in the media matter enormously. This is the fourth destructive Israeli war on the Gaza Strip since December 27, 2008 (lasting 22 days). Distorted takes on Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza, especially by public officials and journalists, are still rampant, echoing the long-standing hasbara of the apartheid Israeli state and the political alliances Israel has forged in the West since the Nakba:

CNN reporter Robyn Curnow asked Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet living in his Sheikh Jarrah home in Jerusalem if he supported “violent protests in favor of his family”? Edward “Ned” Price, an American political advisor and a former intelligence officer serving as the spokesman for the U.S. Department of State, refused to condemn the killing of Palestinian children on the basis that he did not have “enough information about events on the ground.” Dominic Raab, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs who had been silent for months when Israeli settlers brutalized families in Sheikh Jarrah, condemned “the firing of rockets at Jerusalem and locations within Israel. The ongoing violence in Jerusalem and Gaza must stop.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used “some of his favorite buzz words: ‘concern,’ ‘sadness,’ and ‘empathy,’ while answering a question from New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jagmeet Singh about the situation in Palestine, following with unwavering support for “Israel’s right to defend itself.” The New York Times’ Isabel Kershner, ran a series of articles with headlines including “Arab-Jewish Coexistence in Israel Suddenly Ruptured,” and “Israeli-Palestinian hostilities explode, with shocking communal violence.”

Two concepts/memes persist: One is Israel’s so-called “right” to exist as a Jewish state and thus defend itself with “violence” if need be (and concomitantly is licensed to march every Palestinian who resists to prison or death), and another is that Palestinian armed struggle for liberation is “terror” activity.

The first has a long history of Zionist deception and a spectacular public relations campaign worldwide using a Jewish narrative and Jewish influence wherever it could be applied. Thus the conflation we see today between Zionism and Judaism.

The confusion is difficult to erase even as Jews worldwide are increasingly speaking against Israel’s apartheid and violence in Gaza — See my blog post titled “Jews” vs. “Jewish People” — which not to use and why. Consider a news item in the Independent today about a letter by Google Jewish employees known as ‘Jewish Diaspora in Tech’ urging Google not to conflate Israel with Jewish people, adding that ‘anti-Zionism is not antisemitism’. In Gaza Israel has so far killed over 200 and injured more than 1,400 people. The letter says in part:

We ask Google leadership to make a company-wide statement recognising the violence in Palestine and Israel, which must include direct recognition of the harm done to Palestinians by Israeli military and gang violence,” the employees wrote in a version of the letter that has been made public.

While both Israelis and Palestinians have been harmed and killed in the ongoing conflict, the Jewish employees said that ignoring the deadly attacks faced by Palestinians erased the company’s Palestinian coworkers.

I am happy about this statement, of course, although I don’t understand what the identity ‘Jewish Diaspora in Tech’ is meant to signify. Are they religious and is this a spiritual/mythical designation or a nationalist one? The very name of the group, in my opinion, adds to the confusion of the terrible situation in Palestine since the Nakba.

The following quotation by Menachem Ussishkin, a Russian-born Zionist leader and head of the Jewish National Fund, in a speech at the 7th World Zionist Congress, Petrograd, May 1917, sums up how Zionism has weaponized the spiritual concept of “Diaspora Jews” against Palestinians:

Zionism is the solution of the Jewish question. None of us is thinking that all Jewish people must relocate to Palestine, at least in the foreseeable future. This is absolutely unnecessary. What IS necessary, and what our goal is — is creation of a national-territorial center for all Jewish people in the world, a national mother country for our national colonies worldwide.

Such center is being founded and keeps being strengthened by the forces of Diaspora. Diaspora is very important to us. On the other hand, the scattered bits and pieces of Jewry only then can be said to lead a healthy life, when they are nourished by the life juices of the Mother Country. Only through the unbreakable bond between the Mother Country and its colonies, through its organic symbiosis, we envision the healing of the Jewish nation, the solution for the Jewish people. Thus the work in Palestine and the work in Diaspora organically intertwine and complement one another.

Similarly, Vincent Fean, Chair of trustees, Balfour Project asks a very good question of Israeli leaders in an article in Arab Digest titled: Israel-Palestine: in search of the rule of law, May 18, 2021, but goes on elsewhere to refer to Israel’s “right” to the “Holy land.”

His question is: “Is your vision peace with equality, or is ‘peace’ for you the absence of Palestinian resistance to permanent Israeli control, amounting to oppression?”

Unfortunately, in his statement for the Balfour Project’s upcoming Conference on Jerusalem, Fean speaks of how “the Jewish people exercised their right to self-determination in the Holy Land more than 70 years ago with British help.”

Well, the “Jewish people” have no “right” to Palestine, which he euphemistically calls the Holy Land; Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants do, whatever religion they may follow. This language/idea that claims “both sides have rights in Palestine” is the Zionist narrative that we are trying to debunk.

The second persistent hasbara claim is that Palestinians, an occupied people, do not have a right to armed resistance.

But as Stanley Cohen says in Palestinians Have a Legal Right to Armed Struggle:

Long ago, it was settled that resistance and even armed struggle against a colonial occupation force is not just recognised under international law but specifically endorsed… Though Israel has tried, time and time again, to recast the unambiguous intent of this precise resolution — and thus place its now half-century-long occupation in the West Bank and Gaza beyond its application — it is an effort worn thin to the point of palpable illusion by the exacting language of the declaration itself. In relevant part, section 21 of the resolution strongly condemned “the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East and the continual bombing of Palestinian civilians, which constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of the self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people” … Never ones to hesitate in rewriting history, long before the establishment of the United Nations, European Zionists deemed themselves to be an occupied people as they emigrated to Palestine — a land to which any historical connection they had had long since passed through a largely voluntary transit.

Indeed, a full 50 years before the UN spoke of the right of armed struggle as a vehicle of indigenous liberation, European Zionists illegally co-opted the concept as the Irgun, Lehi and other terrorist groups undertook a decade’s long reign of deadly mayhem. … Self-determination is a difficult, costly march for the occupied. In Palestine, no matter what the weapon of choice — whether voice, pen or gun — there is a steep price to be paid for its use.

Today, “speaking truth to power” has become very much a popular mantra of resistance in neoliberal circles and societies. In Palestine, however, for the occupied and oppressed, it is an all-but-certain path to prison or death. Yet, for generations of Palestinians stripped of the very breath that resonates with the feeling of freedom, history teaches there is simply no other choice.

Silence is surrender. To be silent is to betray all those who have come before and all those yet to follow.

And as Stanley Cohen also says: “It’s time for Israel to accept that as an occupied people, Palestinians have a right to resist — in every way possible.”

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

21 May 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Feroze Mithiborwala

Celebrations have broken out across Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, across all of historic Palestine. Clearly after the 11-day war, the Palestinian Resistance has emerged stronger, with more widespread & greater global support.

The struggle of the Palestinian people to safeguard the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah from ethnic cleansing, to defending the Al-Aqsa Masjid from continued attacks & destruction by Jewish Zionist fanatics, has spurred on the global solidarity movements across the world. All of Netanyahu’s strategies to provoke that have led to this uprising and the subsequent war, lie in tatters. Netanyahu in his desperation to cling on to power, has considerably weakened Israel politically, as well has exposed Israel’s military weaknesses. The regional resistance is closely watching, observing.

Do note that, unlike the previous times, Netanyahu & the Israeli Army, did not have the guts to launch a land invasion, which they always resorted to in the past. The tanks & the infantry were lined up at the Northern & Eastern borders of Gaza, but they did not set a toe inside the liberated territory. This only goes to prove the strength of the Resistance within Gaza and the fast decreasing of the Israeli military machine. Israeli soldiers only show their bravery when they attack unarmed Palestinians, shoot them, break their arms, raid their houses, bomb & kill their children. Gaza is the Warsaw Ghetto & the Israeli’s are the Nazi’s of our times.

Since the year 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon, it took 18 years for the Lebanese National Resistance, led by the Hezbollah, Amal & Communists among others forces, to defeat and throw out the Israeli army. Thus the year 2000 was a major turning point in the strategic balance across the region.

This was followed by the liberation of Gaza between 2003-2005. It was led by the Palestinian national resistance, at the forefront of which was the Hamas, including the Fatah, PFLP and other forces as well. This marked a major defeat for the Israelis, as they withdrew from occupied territory for the first time since 1948. Thus Gaza, a little strip of land, a part of Palestine was finally liberated.

Note, post-1967, when the Israel defeated 4 Arab armies in 6 days, since that period of supposed arrogant invincibility, the tide has greatly changed since then. In fact, between 1967 to 1973 itself (The War of Attrition), during the Yom Kippur War, the Israelis were defeated by the Egyptian army and had to return the Sinai Desert. Though Israel gained here by a US brokered peace treaty with Egypt, thus effectively neutralizing the biggest Arab Army from the conflict.

Then in 2006, the 11th of July, the Israelis yet again invaded Lebanon, with the objective of defeating the Hezbollah and the Resistance forces that dwelt in South Lebanon, bordering Israel, or rather 1948 occupied Palestine.

Israel invaded with 20,000 infantry, tanks, warships, fighter jets, cruise missiles, all the latest US weaponry posdible. It was an all out war. But after a 34-day long war, Israel stood defeated by the Hezbollah led Lebanese National Resistance. Despite such a massive attack, the Israelis could not take an inch of Lebanese territory. On the last day, the Israelis’ lost 34 of their advanced tanks to Russian made Kornet missiles. The underground tunnel network, from man-to-man combat, to the fact that the Lebanese fighters were far more well trained and yes, braver – whilst the Israelis depended more on their high-tech weapons from the US, were all factors that led to this disastrous defeat for Israel.

This was an historic turning point for the Resistance, as this marked the end of the hegemony of the Israeli Military. No more could Israel hope to settle political matters by recourse to military means, those days were now long gone. Also whilst the US, UK, France, all backed Israel, the Lebanese National Resistance was backed by Syria & Iran. A new phase of the struggle had now emerged, with the strategic balance of power shifting towards the Regional forces, those committed to ending the Imperial-zionist occupation of the region.

Post-2006, a clear alliance emerged between Israel-US & the Saudis. Then began the wars on Libya, Syria, Yemen & increased targeting of Iran.

Syria was a special target of the Zionists, as it provides the greatest haven for the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian refugees as well. After 10 years, Syria has withstood the war imposed by the Imperial-Zionist & the nexus of the regional collaborators. Crucially Russia entered the war theatre in October 2015, to support the Syrian nation. This marked the decisive rise of the Russian role in geopolitical affairs, rarely witnessed since the collapse of the USSR in 1989-90.

In the course of the last 3 months, those Arab nations that waged the war against Syria, namely Saudi, UAE, Qatar, among others, now are all building ties with Syria. The Saudi war on Yemen too has led to the defeat of the Saudi-UAE-Israel-US-UK-French bloc. Though Turkey & the US, both continue to wreck havoc in Syria, but the Syrian Army will defeat them in the coming phase.

The US is withdrawing from both Iraq & Afghanistan, having achieved the destruction of two nations & the genocide of the population. In the case of Afghanistan, the regional powers, namely – Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, India & the bordering Central Asian nations, will have to work closely to stabilise and help that nation rebuild.

Interestingly, the biggest fault-line, the Saudi-Iran schism, is also witnessing a dialogue, which is already leading to positive political developments in Syria & Yemen. The fact that the Saudis have finally reached out to Iran, which was always open for a dialogue will eventually neutralise the Israeli-US strategy of playing the Sunni-Shia card, to divide the region. Here Baghdad has played a key role in successfully facilitating this crucial dialogue.

Thus the Saudis & Iran have entered a dialogue, as have Turkey & Egypt. The Saudis & Turkey are also in a dialogue. The stabilisation & cooperation of the regional powers is indeed bad news for the Israelis & the US – and great news for Palestine, for the Palestinian Resistance.

This also destroys Trump’s deal of the century, which now lies in tatters.

The fact that the US is now back in dialogue with Iran to yet again negotiate the Iran P5+1 Nuclear Deal, is also a strategic development of great significance.

This yet again proves the resilience and strength of the resistance bloc, namely Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon & Palestine. More nations and anti-colonial forces in the region will now gravitate towards this bloc.

Thus the next phase of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine will lead to great geopolitical and strategic changes in the balance of power, across the World.

I would lastly say, in the liberation of Palestine lies the liberation of the world, in the Resurrection of Palestine, lies the Resurrection of the World. And yes, to refer to a well known Biblical verse – Jerusalem has yet again emerged as a “Light unto the Nations….”

Feroze Mithiborwala is Founder-National Gen. Sec. India Palestine Solidarity Forum

21 May 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Maureen Clare Murphy

A ceasefire ending 11 days of intense violence in Gaza was announced late Thursday, taking effect in the early hours of Friday.

Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza continued in the hours after the ceasefire was announced and before the time it was due to take effect.

But after the clock counted down to ceasefire time, celebrations erupted from Gaza City to Ramallah:

@AJArabic

The ceasefire, brokered by Egypt, will bring relief to sleepless Palestinians in Gaza who have been terrorized anew on top of previous traumas inflicted by Israel.

It will pause Israel’s horrifying practice of bringing buildings down on the heads of Palestinian families, with 14 losing three or more members in a single attack since 10 May.

But it will hardly end Israel’s violence in Gaza, which has been under a severely tightened air, sea and land blockade since 2007.

Despite Israeli bluster, the last 11 days have been a tremendous failure for the state by any calculation, save for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career, which stood to gain from it.

And despite a gaping disparity in military power, the armed resistance led by Hamas in Gaza asserted its increased capacity and deterrence, striking areas in Israel previously thought to be out of its range.

After launching some 4,000 rockets over the past 11 days, Hamas said that it still had enough in its stockpiles to keep firing towards Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for another several months. After the ceasefire was declared, Hamas’ armed wing said it “humiliated the enemy.”

Meanwhile, Palestinian unity across geographic and political divides has galvanized in recent days in ways not seen in years and has inspired renewed global solidarity.

World stands with Palestine

Palestinians have demonstrated yet again that they are steadfastly determined to remain on and liberate their land.

Their resistance against a settler-colony state that seeks their removal and replacement has always come at a great cost, particularly in Gaza.

Home to two million stateless Palestinians, most of them refugees, Gaza remains in shambles after yet another massive Israeli offensive broadly targeting civilian infrastructure – the fourth since late 2008.

Factories targeted, farmer killed

Even after a ceasefire was announced, Israel continued to pound Gaza following a day of targeting factories and other civilian sites.

Palestinians had launched projectiles from the territory on Thursday after an eight-hour overnight lull.

Twelve people in Israel – including three foreign workers, a soldier and two children – were killed by rocket fire from Gaza or while running for shelter during rocket strikes since 10 May.

While many rockets were intercepted by Israel’s missile defense system of the past week and a half, several apartments were damaged, as well as a gas pipeline, and the projectiles paused operations at two airports and a gas rig, according to The New York Times.

Al Mezan, a human rights group in Gaza, blamed Washington for providing political cover to Israel by thwarting a UN Security Council statement on the violence and allowing it to commit “more of what manifestly amounts to war crimes.”

On Wednesday and early Thursday, Israeli attacks killed 11 Palestinians in Gaza, including two children and three women, and wounded 100 more, Al Mezan added.

According to the human rights group, women and children account for nearly half of the more than 230 Palestinians killed in Gaza since 10 May.

Israeli occupation forces opened fire towards Hasan Sami Hasan al-Borno, 63, while he was farming his land in Johr al-Deek village south of Gaza City on Wednesday. Al-Borno was killed with a live bullet to the chest, according to preliminary reporting by Al Mezan.

That same day, Israeli drones fired a missile at a street in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, killing 10-year-old Dima Asaliya. The girl “had gone to bring an electric cooker the family used to bake bread from her sister’s house and was returning home when she was killed,” her uncle told Defense for Children International Palestine.

Also on Thursday, Iyad Salha, 34, who used a wheelchair, and his pregnant wife, Amani Mahawish, 38, and their 2-year-old daughter Nagham Salha were killed when an Israeli missile struck their Deir al-Balah home in central Gaza.

Fidaa al-Qidra, 34, was killed by a projectile that hit her Deir al-Balah home that same day.

Early Thursday morning, Israeli warplanes fired two missiles at a home in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, destroying it. Huda Salah al-Khuzundar, 36, was killed while her husband, daughter and seven neighbors were injured.

Israel has targeted around 150 residential buildings, including six towers, three of which were destroyed, according to Al Mezan.

Around 450 housing units in Gaza have been destroyed.

Al Mezan said that “chronic inaction by the international community is instrumental in perpetuating Israel’s continued tactics” targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure.

“The intensity and frequency of these attacks, with heavy munitions employed, have created an atmosphere of terror, in what amounts to psychological warfare that increasingly subjects Palestinian families to suffering and harm,” the rights group said.

The full-blown hostilities were set off after Israeli police attacked Ramadan worshippers at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, injuring hundreds, last Monday. Hamas responded to the assault by firing rockets towards Israel.

The al-Aqsa siege came after weeks of restrictions on Palestinian assembly in Jerusalem and imminent forced evictions of Palestinians from the city’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood to make way for Jewish settlers.

Around 260 Palestinians have been killed throughout their homeland – the lands comprising Gaza, the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and Israel – since 10 May, with thousands more injured.

UNRWA, the UN agency that provides for Palestinian refugees, said that 19 children who study at its schools were killed in Gaza during that period.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad said that at least 20 of their fighters were killed, the AP news agency reported.

The UN’s human rights office said that verified the deaths of 65 children, 38 women (four of whom were pregnant), and 127 men as a result of hostilities in Gaza.

“The overall number includes three people with disabilities, including a child,” the UN said.

Of the 230 Palestinians in Gaza whose deaths it has confirmed, the UN human rights office said that at least 128 were civilians and that at least 218, including 62 children, were “seemingly killed by Israeli forces.”

The UN clarified that some fatalities in Gaza may have resulted from Palestinian rockets falling short.

The UN said that some 91,000 people in Gaza were internally displaced as a result of Israel’s bombing. Around 66,000 sought refuge at dozens of UN-flagged schools across Gaza while the remainder stayed with host families.

Some 50 schools were damaged in Israeli bombing across Gaza.

The World Health Organization said that Israeli strikes damaged at least 18 hospitals and clinics were damaged, and one health facility was destroyed. Another hospital isn’t functioning due to a lack of electricity.

The Hamas government in Gaza said that Israel’s offensive has caused some $322 million in damages.

Accountability

In the absence of international accountability, a repeat of the last 11 days of Israeli terror in Gaza is all but guaranteed.

“Accountability must rise to the top of the agenda of the United Nations,” a group of human rights experts stated earlier this week.

“The international community must ensure that Israel, the occupying power, complies fully with the more than 30 UN Security Council resolutions and the hundreds of General Assembly resolutions of which it is in breach,” the experts added.

“A brand new diplomatic playbook is needed, which leaves behind realpolitik,” they said. “A rights-based approach must guide the diplomacy of the international community to secure a just and durable solution.”

That message appears to have been ignored by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who called for a return to the failed approach of a negotiated two-state solution while urging for a ceasefire on Thursday.

Palestinian groups and unions, political movements and unions worldwide have called on the UN to investigate Israel’s regime of apartheid over the Palestinian people as a whole.

The Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq called on the UN and member states to implement targeted sanctions and cease the sale of weapons to Israel until it “adheres to its international obligations under the UN Charter, including the prohibition on the acquisition of territory through use of force.”

The International Criminal Court is currently investigating war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza, including Israel’s conduct during its 2014 assault.

Human rights groups have called on the ICC to probe Israel’s targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including towers housing media offices.

Maureen Clare Murphy is an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada and lives in Chicago.

21 May 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

The Caribbean Pan-African Network (CPAN), the Network for Defense of Humanity, Caribbean Chapter, Organization for the Victory of the People (Guyana), The People’s Empowerment Party (Barbados) and the Caribbean Movement for Peace and Integration condemn what can only be described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the settler-colonial, Zionist and racist entity known as Israel.

The occupation of Palestine by those who subscribe to the racist ideology of Zionism, and the displacement of Palestinians from their homeland is illegal and constitutes a crime against humanity. The current situation is part of an ongoing campaign of dispossession, terror and murder of Palestinians that began in 1948, and is referred to by Palestinians as the Nakba, which means disaster or catastrophe. Only 150 miles long, Gaza is the most densely populated territory in the world, with a population of 2 million. It can literally be described as an open air prison or concentration camp, since the residents cannot leave and therefore cannot escape the lethal bombardment by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

It has been reported today that a teenager, suffering from severe trauma, committed suicide in Gaza. He watched as his younger brother was killed while playing football in an airstrike during the 2008 Israeli war on Gaza. His older brother was killed in the 2012 war on Gaza and he lost his father in the 2014 war. His mother was killed yesterday in a bombing raid by the same Zionist war machine that killed the rest of his family. This current attack is the continuation of an ongoing war, as illustrated by the tragic story of this teenager and his family, a story that epitomizes the story of all those who reside in Gaza. The children of Gaza are traumatized – those men, women and children that are not being murdered, and are not having their homes and businesses demolished, are literally starving, without access to food and water.

Enough is enough. We are calling on CARICOM to unequivocally condemn this crime against humanity, and to call for a region wide trade and cultural boycott of Israel. We call on any Caribbean nations that have relations with the State of Israel to halt all ties and trade immediately. We are calling on the US and West European powers to stop their attempt to perpetuate the false narrative that refers to this as “a conflict” with two sides that are equally to blame. One side, the Israelis, are occupiers, who have established a settler-colonial state and have one of the most sophisticated and heavily armed forces in the world, possessing an arsenal of nuclear weapons, while the Palestinians are a displaced people, refugees in their own land, the victims of this illegal and brutal occupation. They have no state, no army, no control over airways or ports, and are defending themselves against the Israeli onslaught, with an array of medium and long range missiles. If there was ever a David and Goliath scenario – this is it.

We call on the US, Britain and the EU to reign in their ally, Israel, which is only able to survive and persecute the Palestinians because of the ongoing support of these imperial powers. The world is watching, and as you witnessed during the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the youth of this world are united and more determined than ever in their resistance to tyranny. The people of the world, despite the cowardice and hypocrisy of so many of our governments, who are afraid to stand up to Israel and their imperialist backers, will not rest this time until the Palestinians are free from this inhumane occupation. It is time for action.

18 May 2021

By Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal

This text was first published by Global Research in November 2013, following the indictment.

The government of Israel headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has committed extensive crimes against humanity. President Trump in his “Deal of the Century” has endorsed this criminal agenda directed against the people of Palestine.

World public opinion is largely unaware of the fact that in November 2013, the State of Israel was the object of a historic judgment by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (KLWCT).

“From 1948 and continuing to date the State of Israel (hereafter ‘the Defendant’) carried out against the Palestinian people a series of acts namely killing, causing serious bodily harm and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction. … Such conduct constitutes the Crime of Genocide under international law including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide 1948 (‘the Genocide Convention’) in particular Article II and punishable under Article III of the said Convention. It also constitutes the crime of genocide as stipulated in Article 10 of the Charter of the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War.”

In enforcing the so-called “Deal of the Century”, the president of the United States is complicit in extensive war crimes.

Below are selected excerpts from the judgment. The full judgment is available in pdf. form.

The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad chaired the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) which led to the indictment against the State of Israel.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR WAR CRIMES AND GENOCIDE

“The Tribunal recommends to the War Crimes Commission to give the widest international publicity to this conviction and grant of reparations, as these are universal crimes for which there is a responsibility upon nations to institute prosecutions.”

Please help us in this endeavour. Forward this text far and wide. The community of nations has the responsibility to endorse this indictment against the State of Israel.

Michel Chossudovsky, Member of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC), February 10, 2020, May 13, 2021

***

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) versus the State of Israel

The proceedings directed against the State of Israel were led by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC)

Members of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) are:

Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad (Chairman), Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, Dr. Denis Halliday, Mr. Musa Ismail, Dr. Zulaiha Ismail, Dr. Yaacob Merican, Dr. Hans von Sponeck.

Working in liaison with their Malaysian counterparts, commissioners Dr. Denis Halliday, former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization were present in Kuala Lumpur throughout the proceedings.

This important judicial process has received very little coverage in the Western media. Global Research published several reports following this historic judgment against the State of Israel.

“The perpetrators [State of Israel] had committed acts against the Palestinians, with intent to kill, cause serious bodily or mental harms and deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinians as a whole or in part.”

“The Tribunal recommends to the War Crimes Commission to give the widest international publicity to this conviction and grant of reparations, as these are universal crimes for which there is a responsibility upon nations to institute prosecutions.

The Tribunal deplores the failure of international institutions to punish the State of Israel for its crimes and its total lack of respect of International Law and the institutions of the United Nations.”

THE KUALA LUMPUR WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL
20 – 25 NOVEMBER 2013
Case No. 3 – CHG – 2013

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission
Against
Amos Yaron
Case No. 4 – CHG – 2013

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission
Against
The State of Israel

..

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal (Tribunal) reconvened on 20 November 2013 to hear two charges against Amos Yaron (first Defendant) and the State of Israel (second Defendant). The first Defendant was charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, whilst the second Defendant was charged with the crime of genocide and war crimes.

The charge against the first Defendant is as follows –

“The Defendant Amos Yaron perpetrated War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and Genocide in his capacity as the Commanding Israeli General in military control of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Israeli occupied Lebanon in September of 1982 when he knowingly facilitated and permitted the large-scale Massacre of the Residents of those two camps in violation of the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare of 1907; the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949; the 1948 Genocide Convention; the Nuremberg Charter (1945), the Nuremberg Judgment (1946), and the Nuremberg Principles (1950); customary international law, jus cogens, the Laws of War, and International Humanitarian Law”

The charge against the second Defendant [State of Israel] is as follows –

“From 1948 and continuing to date the State of Israel (hereafter ‘the Defendant’) carried out against the Palestinian people a series of acts namely killing, causing serious bodily harm and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.

The conduct of the Defendant was carried out with the intention of destroying in whole or in part the Palestinian people. These acts were carried out as part of a manifest pattern of similar conduct against the Palestinian people.

These acts were carried out by the Defendant through the instrumentality of its representatives and agents including those listed in Appendices 1 and 2.

Such conduct constitutes the Crime of Genocide under international law including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide 1948 (‘the Genocide Convention’) in particular Article II and punishable under Article III of the said Convention.

It also constitutes the crime of genocide as stipulated in Article 10 of the Charter of the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War.

Such conduct by the Defendant as an occupying power also violates customary international law as embodied in the Hague Convention of 1907 Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.

Such conduct also constitutes War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity under international law.”

The charges (together with the particulars of the charges) had been duly served on the Defendants, and were read in open court by the Registrar as these proceedings commenced.

Neither Defendant was present in these proceedings, but both were represented by the Amicus Curiae-Defence Team.

Read Complete Judgment (pdf)

Selected Excerpts

2 Prosecution’s Case

The Prosecution’s case against the first Defendant is that the first Defendant had committed War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, and Genocide in his capacity as the Commanding Israeli General in military control of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Israeli-occupied Lebanon in September of 1982 when he knowingly facilitated and permitted the large-scale Massacre of the Residents of those two camps. These crimes were in violation of, inter alia, the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, the 1948 Genocide Convention, jus cogens, International Humanitarian Law; and Articles 9, 10, and 11 of the Charter of the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War.

The Prosecution’s case against the second Defendant is that from 1948 and continuing to date the State of Israel had systematically carried out against the Palestinian people a series of acts namely killing, causing serious bodily harm and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction – with the intention of destroying in whole or in part the Palestinian people.

These acts constitute the Crime of Genocide under international law including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide 1948 (‘the Genocide Convention’) in particular Article II and punishable under Article III of the said Convention. It also constitutes the crime of genocide as stipulated in Article 10 of the Charter of the Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War.

In his opening statement, the Chief Prosecutor Prof Gurdial Singh said that the Prosecution will adduce evidence to prove the counts in the indictment through oral and written testimonies of victims, witnesses, historical records, narrative in books and authoritative commentaries, resolutions of the United Nations and reports of international bodies.

6. The Defence case

Mr. Jason Kay Kit Leon of the Amicus Curiae-Defence Team submitted that in the charges against the two Defendants, the Prosecution had listed war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace. Apparently the Prosecution had abandoned these charges, concentrating only on genocide.

He said that the offence of genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention 1948, whilst the OED defines it simply as “the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group”.

He submitted that the charge of genocide is unique; it means that you don’t like a group, you kill them; you kill them in a grand manner. Genocide means that at the end of the act, you have a lesser number of victims than before the genocide started.

He further submitted that when one talks of “massive killing”, it is many hundreds of thousands to millions of people. To suggest that an isolated event, the unfortunate murder of 3,000 people (Sabra and Shatila) is the same as massive killing is almost disrespectful of the true horror of massive killing (as in Rwanda, where 800,000 people were killed in 100 days).

With regard to the Kahan Report, the Amicus Curiae-Defence Team said that it also identified other people as being responsible, with two other names other than Yaron still alive. The question is why only Yaron was charged? Why was Defence Minister Ariel Sharon spared?

He also submitted that the PLO had repeatedly violated the July 1981 cease-fire agreement. By June 1982, when the IDF went into Lebanon, the PLO had made life in northern Israel intolerable through its repeated shelling of Israeli towns.

On Cast Lead, the Amicus Curiae-Defence Team submitted that the IDF had come out with two reports. The point is if you are going to kill people nilly willy, you do not report it.

On the issue of the wall, the Amicus Curiae-Defence Team submitted that the primary consideration is one of security of the Israeli settlers. The State of Israel has a duty to defend their lives, safety and well-being.

On the issue of checkpoints, the Amicus Curiae-Defence Team said countries have a right to immigration laws. With regard to Plan Dalet, the Amicus Curiae-Defence Team said that it is subject to divergent opinions, with historians on one side asserting that it was entirely defensive, while other historians assert that the plan aimed at an ethnic cleansing.

4. Prosecution’s closing submission

In his closing submission, the Chief Prosecutor said that he had called 11 witnesses (some of whom had testified through Skype), tendered 15 exhibits and furnished several documents and reports to the Tribunal during the course of the proceedings.

He urged the Tribunal to bear in mind that this is a Tribunal of Conscience and the case before it is an extraordinary case, which Winston Churchill used to call as a “crime without a name”.

He said that the Prosecution had provided evidence of facts which, examined as a whole, will show that the perpetrators had committed acts against the Palestinians, with intent to kill, cause serious bodily or mental harms and deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinians as a whole or in part.

From the testimony of Prof Pappe (PW8) the Prosecution had shown that before 1948, before UN Resolution 47, there was already a plan in place to take over the Palestinian territory, and this plan would be activated the moment the British relinquished its mandate over the territory.

At that point in time, the Palestinians were on 94% of the land, with the Jewish population settling over a mere 6% of the land. Under the UN partition plan, more than 50% of the land was to be given to the Jews.

Plan Dalet might not legally be genocidal in form at its inception, but as it took shape the ethnic cleansing metamorphised into killing, massacre and creating impossible conditions for life for the Palestinians – either they leave or they die. The Prosecution submits this is genocide within the meaning of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention.

On Sabra and Shatila, prosecution witnesses (PW1 and PW6) had testified that the Palestinian refugees in those camps had been killed by the Phalangists, aided and abetted by the Israelis who were in complete control of the two camps.

According to the Kahan Report, all of Beirut was under Israeli control, and there was clear symbiotic relationship between Israel and the Christian forces (the Lebanese Maronite Christian militia or the Phalangists or Keta’ib).

On Operation Cast Lead in 2008, the Chief Prosecutor said that the Israeli Defence Force had used all kinds of weapons, including white phosphorus – which is an incendiary weapon. The use of incendiary weapons is prohibited under Protocal III on the Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons.

As a result of the Israeli occupation of Gaza, nowhere in Gaza is safe for civilians. 1.5 million Palestinians are now trapped in despair, their fragile economy ruined. Under the Dahiya Doctrine (October 2008), the complete destruction of Gaza is the ultimate objective, the whole place must be flattened.

The Prosecution submits that the cumulative effect of the actions taken by the Israeli government, as shown by the Prosecution witnesses and the several documents tendered to the Tribunal, have shown beyond reasonable doubt that Israel is guilty of the crime of genocide under the Genocide Convention and the Charter of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (The Charter).

Co-Prosecutor Tan Sri Abdul Aziz, submitting on the first charge against Amos Yaron, said that Amos Yaron was the commanding officer in charge of the Israeli Defence Force, in charge of the area of Beirut, and camps Sabra and Shatila. He said there were two issues which he has to deal with – first, whether or not there was a large scale massacre of the 10 residents of the two camps, and second, whether or not Amos Yaron facilitated and permitted such massacre, in violation of international law and Articles 9, 10 and 11 of the Charter?

On the first issue, he submitted there was a large scale massacre, as testified by PW1. She was there, and she saw the massacre with her own eyes. There was corrobating testimony by PW6, and further acknowledged in the Kahan Report.

On the second issue, Amos Yaron was in charge, to ensure that there would be peace and law and order. The Kahan Report itself concluded that anybody who knew about Lebanon would know that by releasing the Phalangists into Beirut, there would be massacre. Surely, Amos Yaron, the General in charge, must have known that by allowing the Phalangists to go into the two camps, the massacre would take place. But he decided to do nothing.

He received the reports of the killing of women and children, but he did not check the report. He did not pass the report to his superiors. The co-prosecutor submits that by ignoring all this despite knowing the circumstances, he himself had the intention of causing the death of the people in the two camps.

10.3 Commission’s Register of War Criminals

Further, under Article 35 of the same Chapter, this Tribunal recommends to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission that the names of the two convicted parties herein be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals and be publicised accordingly.

10.4 The Tribunal recommends to the War Crimes Commission to give the widest international publicity to this conviction and grant of reparations, as these are universal crimes for which there is a responsibility upon nations to institute prosecutions.

10.5 The Tribunal deplores the failure of international institutions to punish the State of Israel for its crimes and its total lack of respect of International Law and the institutions of the United Nations. It urges the Commission to use all means to publicise this judgement and in particular with respect to the Parliaments and Legislative Assemblies of the major powers such as members of the G8 and to urge these countries to intervene and put an end to the colonialist and racist policies of the State of Israel and its supporters.

Read Complete Judgment (pdf)

KLWCT and Global Research 26 November 2013

18 May 2021

Source: www.globalresearch.ca

By Chris Hedges

Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.

Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”

This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy. Saudi Arabia, a country that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.

Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions.

Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people. From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land. The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel is not defending the rule of law. Israel is not a democracy. It is an apartheid state.

That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crime by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves.

The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country. The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement. Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.

The investment by Israel and is backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East. These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.

The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel. This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites.

Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous. It is not only bad for the Jews. It is bad for everyone. It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes. Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other. They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence. The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence. These extremists are ideological twins.

This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society. It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security. Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States. It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.

It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.”

Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims. This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.

There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States. The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies. The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society. We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down. It will be devastating for the Palestinians. It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.

15 May 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

By Mahatma Gandhi

Several letters have been received by me, asking me to declare my views
about the Arab-Jew question in Palestine and the persecution of the Jews in
Germany. It is not without hesitation that I venture to offer my views on
this very difficult question.

My sympathies are all with the Jews. I have known them intimately in South
Africa. Some of them became lifelong companions. Through these friends I
came to learn much of their age long persecution. They have been the
untouchables of Christianity. The parallel between their treatment by
Christians and the treatment of untouchables by Hindus is very close.

Religious sanction has been invoked in both cases for the justification of
the inhuman treatment meted out to them. Apart from the friendships,
therefore, there is the more common universal reason for my sympathy for
the Jews. But my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice.

The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me.
The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews
have hankered after return to Palestine.

Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country
their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?
Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their
national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of
the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French.

If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being
forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled?
Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the
national home affords a colorable justification for the German expulsion of
the Jews. But the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel
in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as Hitler seems to have
gone. And he is doing it with religious zeal. For, he is propounding a new
religion of exclusive and militant nationalism in the name of which any
inhumanity becomes an act of humanity to be rewarded here and hereafter.

The crime of an obviously mad but intrepid youth is being visited upon his
wholerace with unbelievable ferocity. If there ever could be a justifiable
war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany to prevent the
wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do
not believe in any war. A discussion of the pros and cons of such a war is,
therefore, outside my horizon or province.

But if there can be no war against Germany, even for such a crime as is
being committed against the Jews, surely there can be no alliance with
Germany. How can there be alliance between a nation, which claims to stand
for justice and democracy and one, which is the declared enemy of both? Or
is England drifting towards armed dictatorship and all it means?

Germany is showing to the world how efficiently violence can be worked when
it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism.It is also showing how hideous, terrible and terrifying it looks in its nakedness.Can the Jews resist this organized and shameless persecution? Is there a way to preserve their self-respect, and not to feel helpless, neglected and forlorn? I submit there is. No person who has faith in a living God need feel helpless or forlorn. Jehovah of the Jews is a God more personal than the God of the Christians, the Mussalmans or the Hindus, though as a matter of fact, in essence, He is common to all and one without a second and beyond description. But as the Jews attribute personality to God and believe that He rules every action of theirs, they ought not to feel helpless.

If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I
would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this I
should not wait for! the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance, but
would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my
example…. …

And now a word to the Jews in Palestine. I have no doubt that they are going
about it in the wrong way. The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a
geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the
Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under
the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the
aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the
goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart.

The same God rules the Arab heart who rules the Jewish heart… They will
find the world opinion in their favor in their religious aspiration. There are
hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the
help of the British bayonet. As it is, they are co-sharers with the
British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not
defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence
in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment
upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong,
nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of
overwhelming odds.

Let the Jews who claim to be the chosen race prove their title by choosing
the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth. Every
country is their home, including Palestine, not by aggression but by loving
service. A Jewish friend has sent me a book called The Jewish Contribution
to Civilization by Cecil Roth. It gives a record of what the Jews have done
to enrich the world’s literature, art, music, drama, science, medicine,
agriculture, etc. Given the will, the Jew can refuse to be treated as the
outcast of the West, to be despised or patronized. He can command the
attention and respect of the world by being the chosen creation of God,
instead of sinking to the brute who is forsaken by God. They can add to
their many contributions the surpassing contribution of non-violent action.

Published in the Harijan
26-11-1938.

Source: www.countercurrents.org

Written by Ali Abunimah, Maureen Clare Murphy and Tamara Nassar

Twenty Palestinians, nine of them children, were killed in Israeli bombing attacks in the Gaza Strip on Monday night.

This came at the end of a day of violence that began in occupied East Jerusalem, where Israeli forces assaulted worshippers at the al-Aqsa mosque compound, injuring hundreds.

Scenes of brutality in Jerusalem generated outrage and solidarity among Palestinians and around the world.

The military wing of the Palestinian resistance organization Hamas issued an ultimatum giving Israel an hour – until 6 pm local time – to withdraw its forces from al-Aqsa and the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, and free detainees.

When the deadline passed, resistance groups in Gaza fired volleys of rockets towards Jerusalem for the first time since the summer 2014 war, prompting celebrations from some Palestinians.

Israelis who had been gathering for the so-called Jerusalem Day march ran for cover as sirens sounded.

No serious Israeli casualties were reported.

A Hamas spokesperson in Gaza said that resistance fighters “fired rockets at occupied Jerusalem, in response to the enemy’s crimes and aggression against the holy city, and its abuse of our people in Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa mosque.”

“Israel will respond with great force,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, adding that “whoever attacks us will pay a heavy price.”

Such warnings should be understood as threats of collective punishment against civilians in Gaza.

Israeli ministers approved an aerial offensive against the territory, with an Israeli military spokesperson saying that the assault “will take a few days.”

The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza reported that 20 people in the besieged territory were killed in Israeli airstrikes.

Nine children were among those killed, Palestinian media reported.

Israel claims that three Hamas fighters were killed in one of its airstrikes and Hamas said one of its commanders was killed.

Israel also reportedly closed Gaza’s sole commercial crossing and further restricted access to the Strip’s coastal waters.

Settler march canceled

Before Hamas’ ultimatum, Israel had suffered a humiliating setback in its effort to assert control over occupied East Jerusalem.

Monday was supposed to be the day thousands of extremist Jewish settlers marched through the Old City to mark so-called Jerusalem Day.

This annual parade is a grotesque display of racism and provocation in which Israelis celebrate their 1967 occupation of the eastern part of Jerusalem.

This year’s march was slated to take place amid heightened tensions and resistance against Israel’s efforts to expel dozens of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood as part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing and Judaization of Jerusalem.

For much of the day, Israeli police maintained that the settler march would proceed on its planned route through the Damascus Gate and into the narrow alleys of the Old City, including its Muslim Quarter.

By afternoon, however, and after recommendations from Israel’s military and the Shin Bet, the state’s domestic spying and torture agency, Netanyahu decided to reroute it before it was canceled altogether.

It was a striking victory for Palestinians, though one that came at a high price in injuries from the indiscriminate Israeli violence.

Hundreds injured

Before dawn on Monday, thousands of Palestinians headed to the al-Aqsa mosque compound to pray at the site and protect it from expected incursions by Jewish extremists and the kinds of violent assault by occupation forces witnessed on Friday and Saturday, when hundreds of Palestinians were injured.

Among the 90,000 Palestinians who gathered at al-Aqsa on Saturday to mark Laylat al-Qadr, one of the holiest nights of Ramadan, were thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

After Israeli police halted dozens of buses bringing worshippers to Jerusalem, many continued their journey to the city on foot.

As dawn broke on Monday, videos and photos shared on social media showed Palestinians preparing to defend the mosque from a new assault that morning by barricading entrances with furniture and gathering rocks.

Just after 8 am, occupation forces launched an assault on the compound, firing volleys of stun grenades, tear gas canisters and rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinians there, injuring worshippers, journalists and medics.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said it attended to almost 400 injured people, with some 220 taken to hospitals.

At least seven Palestinians were seriously hurt, some requiring surgery.

Forces also attacked the women’s prayer area near Bab al-Rahma, the eastern gate of the compound which has been mostly sealed by Israeli authorities since 2003:

Israeli weaponry caused damage inside mosques in the compound:

Yet despite this extreme and indiscriminate violence, Israel’s police chief Kobi Shabtai told media on Monday night that his forces had been too restrained and that it was time to take off the “kid gloves.”

Journalists injured

Among hundreds of Palestinians injured by Israeli forces on Monday were reporters.

This video shows Israeli soldiers cornering Palestinian photojournalist Faiz Abu Rmeleh and beating him on his head

Abu Rmeleh, whose photos have previously been published by The Electronic Intifada, was also assaulted by occupation forces in 2017.

The Palestinian news outlet Al Qastal said three of its reporters were injured by rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas.

Another Palestinian bleeding from his eye was carried by medics who told an Anadolu Agency reporter that the injured man was a journalist:

Attacks on medics

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said Israeli forces prevented their medics from entering the al-Aqsa mosque compound where dozens of wounded Palestinians needed medical attention.

A Palestinian doctor from Jerusalem who came to assist the injured said soldiers prevented him from entering the compound “from every gate”:

Quds News Network reported that Israel attempted to expel Palestinian medics from the compound.

Rescue workers were also among the scores injured inside.

Israeli forces shot Palestinian paramedic Ahmad Dweikat with a rubber-coated steel bullet under his eye:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1BUERBWQAAqfvd?format=jpg&name=900×900

Court hearing delayed

Israel’s highest court tried to defuse growing resistance to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by delaying a hearing on the forced expulsion of three families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood on Sunday.

Israel is applying openly discriminatory laws in an effort to force Palestinians out of their homes so they may be handed over to Jewish settlers.

A high court judge said the hearing would be rescheduled within a month and Palestinian families would be able to stay in their homes until a decision is made.

Israeli courts have consistently ruled in favor of settler groups to expel Palestinian families from homes in occupied East Jerusalem.

Settler organizations, backed by Israel’s state apparatus, are unlikely to abandon their efforts to ethnically cleanse the city of Palestinians.

The goal, however, is to do it quietly, without the commotion that comes with an international outcry.

US blocks UN statement

Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations were reportedly mediating between Hamas and Israel to slow the escalation of hostilities.

The US government expressed its deep concern over “violent confrontations” in Jerusalem but reserved explicit condemnation for rockets fired from Gaza.

Washington’s mission to the UN Security Council reportedly prevented the release of a joint statement condemning violence in Jerusalem.

The European Union’s envoy to Israel meanwhile said he was “extremely concerned over the violence in Jerusalem but only said that the firing of rockets was “totally unacceptable and needs to stop.”

11 May 2021

Source: countercurrents.org

I was interviewed in many media outlets in the past 48 hours about the events here. My message beyond telling them what is really going on on the ground here is simple: This is not a “conflict” or a border dispute nor a tribal or religious issue. It is simple: the last tantrums of the unsettled settler colonial system. I expect things will get a bit worse (always darkest before the dawn). Bombing civilian neighborhoods, shooting unarmed protesters, and lying is a hallmark of all European colonial power encounter with natives. As this was true in South Africa under apartheid and in America after Spanish and British colonization, so it is true in Palestine under European Jewish colonization. Colonial officials like corrupt leader Benjamin Netanyahu (originally Mileikowsky from Poland) are proud of the so called “Iron Dome” defense system against Palestinian resistance rockets from Gaza (but the dome works only to very limited extent and is very costly). $40,000 per iron dome missile, over 1000 fired in the past week so it means it cost US taxpayers $40 million just in spent missiles in one week. US taxpayers are of course footing the bill against their wishes (thanks to the Zionist lobby in Washington) to defend Israeli apartheid ($4 billion annually in military aid– more than US foreign aid to Subsaharan Africa and Latin America combined). All so Israel can advance its illegal and racist policies of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and beyond. Thus the US continues to be complicit in violations of International law that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity (e.g. 12 children killed by US supplied weapons just in one week in Gaza).But the new equation has shown that we are past that age when military might, walls, & armies can dictate the future. People will will dicate the future. The >13 million Palestinians (7.5 million of them refugees and displaced people) supported by hundreds of millions of decent human beings around the world will not succumb to brutal force of colonizers/occupiers/thieves. The smiles on the faces of young Palestinians being kidnapped by heavily armed thugs (aka Israeli security forces) alone gives us hope in a bright future. Palestine will be freed! Demonstrations were held not only in (occupied) Palestinian cities like Jaffa, Haifa, Lod, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem but in over 100 other cities from Washington DC to New York to London to Amman to Sanaa etc. All people see and feel the need to free Palestine – all of Palestine. This is also remarkable despite the manipulated mainstream media trying to hide and obfuscate (even when they report they claim “clashes” and hide the fact of colonial oppression vs oppressed people) and the governments colluding, funding, or normalizing with the apartheid regime. This is one of the most just causes in the world still left unresolved. The latest round started 12 April when Israeli occupiers started the latest round to attempt to restrict Muslims in Jerusalem in its relentless effort to Judaicize the city. For me personally, Jerusalem is my city. I was a high school teacher there and I live in a suburb of it called Bethlehem (5 km away from city center). That Israel denies me and millions others the right to even visit our city (illegally occupied according to International law) will not pass. We will be free. My recommendation to the Israeli public is decolonize their minds and shed the illusion of Jewish supremacy / exceptionalism, return the refugees and sit down with us to forge a future of peace with justice for all! Iron domes, concrete apartheid walls, delusions of destroying the third holiest mosque in Islam, and all the other “measures” taken only backfire.

Here are three forward looking article I wrote many years ago that are relevant today and remind me to keep hope alive

http://qumsiyeh.org/biologyofpeace/

http://qumsiyeh.org/peaceoneartheveninpalestine/

http://qumsiyeh.org/ofcowardicedignityandsolidarity/

Footnote 1: Sheikh Jarrah: Clashes, scuffles, conflict – western media’s euphemisms for Israel’s violence https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/sheikh-jarrah-israel-palestine-western-media-coverage-euphemism
Footnote 2:  Tormented dance of the colonizer
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/04/the-tormented-dance-of-the-colonizer-peter-beinart-liberal-zionism-and-the-battle-for-palestine/

Footnote 3: On 9 May 2011, Haaretz published that Defense Ministry director general Maj. Gen. (res.) Udi Shani said that Israel plans to invest nearly $1 billion in the coming years for the development and production of Iron Dome batteries. “We are no longer approaching this in terms of initial operational capabilities but are defining the final target for absorbing the systems, in terms of schedule and funds. We are talking about [having] 10–15 Iron Dome batteries. We will invest nearly $1 billion on this. This is the goal, in addition to the $205 million that the U.S. government has authorized,” Shani said

Stay Human and keep Palestine alive

Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist and author, founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) at Bethlehem University where he teaches.

12 May 2021

Source: popular-resistance.blogspot.com